by Jon Land
“You think we can win this war by killing one abortion doctor? We can’t. We need to kill all abortion doctors. You think we can win it by shooting up a Holocaust museum? We can’t. We need to burn the building down or blow it up. You think we can prevail by assassinating the president? We can’t. Obama’s done more for our cause than any man in this room. Made us relevant again. Don’t you see? Thanks to him, we don’t have to keep our heads hidden in the sand anymore. I’m not talking about wearing white sheets and burning crosses on lawns. No, I’m talking about taking this country back for real and for good. Our movement’s gone mainstream. Last thing we want to do is create a martyr for the country to rally around. We’ve got enough folks in our back pocket and they’ll be more once we unleash our fountains of fury.”
“That’s all well and good,” came a voice out of the blur before him. “But just where’s all this ordnance supposed to come from?”
“Make me a list,” Arno told him. “You want tanks, high-powered machine guns, helicopter gunships? The sky’s the limit for us now. We’re going to splinter this country right down the middle. Push the piss-ant pussies away and draw more over. There won’t be a lot at first, but those numbers will soar and skyrocket. And a hardened ten percent of the country can accomplish a heck of a lot more than a worthless ninety.”
The men muttered among themselves, drinking in his rhetoric. Spoken from the heart to men without a cogent feel for words but a firm grasp of the ideals he needed if his father’s vision was to be realized.
“We been waiting for this call to arms to come for a long time, Brother Arno,” came another voice, lost in a drawl that sounded more Kentucky-based. “I knew your daddy and he’d be pleased as punch by what you’re fixing to do.”
“But we have to be patient, Brother Eugene,” Arno said, addressing him by name. His eyes had adjusted to the lights, the men seated before him captured in a dull haze that obscured their features, rendering them faceless before him. “Can’t let our goals be lost in haste or in the small thinking that’s plagued us for too long.”
“The hell you say? I been planning a goddamn insurrection since you was in diapers.”
“But it hasn’t come to pass yet, has it? And it won’t either, not ever. FBI’s so far up your movement’s ass, you got them mistaken for hemorrhoids. Before your goddamn revolution can fire a single shot, they’ll have you in chains on charges of treason just like happened to the Hutaree up in Michigan and plenty of others too.”
“Treason? It’s them that should be swinging from the gallows for betraying this country and you damn well know it!”
“You bet I do, but they have the power and always will until we take it from them.”
“Revolution,” another voice chimed in, “just like the man said!”
“They can’t know we’re coming,” Arno proclaimed just the way his father would have. “They can’t know we’re there until we’re already upon them. Otherwise, they’ll crush us. Everyone in this room knows they’re just waiting for the excuse. They read our e-mails, bug our phones, monitor our money, plant their agents inside the worlds we build to keep them out. Anyone who so much as clicks on one of our websites gets a file open at the FBI and a whole new batch of friends in Washington watching over them.”
“Fuck Washington!”
“Yeah! Yeah!” the crowd joined in.
“You wanna fuck Washington?”
“Yeah!”
“You really wanna fuck Washington?”
“YEAH!”
“Then we need to take it over, not storm it. We’ve got to play their game and play it better. You think I’d be standing before you now if the 2010 congressional races hadn’t already got the pot stirring? You think I’d be standing here before you if the writing weren’t already on the wall? Well, it is and all we have to do is read it, my friends.”
“Didn’t bring my glasses,” a man with a beard halfway down to his chest said from the front row. “Why don’t you read it for me, Malcolm?”
“It says Washington is ours to take, the White House included. Starts with guns, but then moves to a civil war fought with markers and chads and levers.”
“What are you saying, son?” asked one of his father’s closest disciples who had founded a ministry across the South that now claimed over three million followers, robots waiting to be programmed.
“The next election,” Arno answered him. “We’re going to elect one of our own as president of the United States.”
39
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
Caitlin was seated on the sill of the rescue truck’s open rear door when D. W. Tepper screeched to a halt near the fire engines that continued to douse the burnt-out remnants of the car she’d pulled over to check. He gazed briefly at the bubbled paint and puckered steel of her rental car, its windshield blown out by the shrapnel that had barely missed Caitlin, and just shook his head.
“And you wanna know why I took up smoking again,” he said, approaching Caitlin through the night with a barn coat covering his shrunken shoulders and Stetson swallowing a good portion of his face. I-35 south had been shut down entirely, traffic rerouted onto side roads nearly flooded out by the sudden torrent that had spilled from the sky.
“Don’t you be blaming that on me, D.W.”
He stopped right before her and laid a warm hand on her shoulder. “You are a one-person wrecking crew, Ranger.”
Caitlin cast her gaze on the smoldering wreck. “One of the firemen’s a reservist who did two tours in Iraq. Said he knows the look of an IED when he sees one.”
“You’re saying you were targeted personally?”
“I’d say if the shoe fits, Captain,” Caitlin said, raising her right foot that was down to the sock, “but the blast blew off one of my boots.”
Tepper’s features relaxed and then tightened again. “You all right otherwise?”
“My ears are still ringing. Besides that, yes.”
Tepper slid up alongside Caitlin and took off his hat. “So who was it did the targeting?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Make me.”
“I went back to the Intrepid to see the young man you sent me to interview two days back. He’s gone. Transferred they said.”
“They said?”
“Kid told me the army planted the IED that blew off his legs in Iraq. Said it was actually a shaped charge and being a medic I figure he could tell. He was in genuine fear for his life, Captain.”
“You didn’t put that in any report I saw.”
“Didn’t have time to file one.”
Tepper ran a nicotine-stained fingertip along a deep crevice dug into his cheek. “Make believe you’re doing so now.”
“Kid claimed it had something to do with a shot-up civilian who was brought into the field hospital where he served as an OR medic. Man’s last words were some kind of numerical designation followed by the mention of something called Operation Rising Dawn.”
“Mean anything to you?”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet?”
“They tried to kill me, D.W.”
“There you go again with ‘they’…”
“Okay, the army.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Sorry, Captain.”
Tepper slapped his hat against his side. “Why you always gotta go taking on King Kong? Once, Caitlin, just once I wish you’d pick an enemy that fits behind bars.”
PART FOUR
There once was a bank robber by the name of Jorge Rodriguez who lived in Mexico. He frequently crossed the border into Texas to rob banks, and he so frustrated the Texas Rangers that a large bounty was placed on his head. Each time they nearly caught up with Rodriguez he would manage to cross the Rio Grande and be safe in Mexico, where the Rangers were prohibited from pursuing him. One day an old Texas Ranger couldn’t stand it any longer. He followed Rodriguez across the border into a little town cantina. He snuck up behind him and put a gun to Rodriguez’s tem
ple. He demanded that the now-infamous bandit tell where he had placed all of his stolen money.
“Tell me, now,” said the Ranger, “or I will blow your head off, right here!”
But, there was a problem. The Ranger could not speak Spanish! In the bar, however, there was a man who volunteered to overcome this impasse by translating for the Ranger. The translator told Rodriguez exactly what the Ranger had said, and then he asked where he had hidden the money. Fearful for his life, Rodriguez quickly told the translator that the money was hidden behind the third brick at the city well. The translator got a solemn look on his face and said to the Ranger in perfect English, “Jorge Rodriguez is a very brave and stubborn man. He said he would rather die than tell you where the money is hidden!”
—Texas Ranger folktale, 1881
40
SAN LUIS POTOSÍ; THE PRESENT
“I’m on my way, outlaw” was all Paz said to Cort Wesley over his cell phone. “I’ll call you when I get to your hotel.”
He’d been sitting in a chair by the window for hours—how many he didn’t know, couldn’t say. He’d moved to the chair after he grew tired of staring at the ceiling or trying to watch Spanish shows on television. He’d checked into the Hotel Museo Palacio at the corner of Galeana and 5 de Mayo specifically because it was a favorite of Mexican tourists as opposed to American ones. He would’ve preferred something simpler and less fancy. But Cort Wesley wasn’t in the mood for exploring and the hotel’s location in the heart the city’s historic center meant he could get himself settled fast to wait for Colonel Guillermo Paz’s call.
Talk about making a deal with the devil.
But Cort Wesley didn’t care. Horns and a tail wouldn’t bother him if their owner could help him find Dylan.
It was always times like these that he picked up the scents of talcum powder and root beer on the air, the smells clinging to Leroy Epps, an ex-boxer who became Cort Wesley’s cellmate during his stretch in the brutal Huntsville prison known as The Walls. Epps had beaten a man to death in self-defense, but the man had been white and well connected enough to land old Leroy life without parole. Inside The Walls his counsel helped keep Cort Wesley sane and his friendship had been the only thing lending order to the chaos. Epps had died of diabetes that had been diagnosed and poorly treated inside, but that didn’t stop Cort Wesley’s mind from conjuring the old man up when he needed him the most.
Tonight Epps showed up seated on the edge of the room’s bed, staring at Cort Wesley in silence with tired eyes still leaking red onto the whites.
“You got something to say, champ, go ahead and say it,” Cort Wesley started.
“Rather watch you sit there and eat yourself alive, bubba.”
“You blame me?”
“For being all twisted in knots over your son, no. For shooting down that Mexican rat turd who ran down his girlfriend, that’s something else again.”
“You sound like Caitlin Strong.”
“Guess that makes both of us right then, don’t it?”
“I’ve never been good at impulse control, champ.”
“Could’ve fooled me inside The Walls, bubba. You were so cool there the temperature used to drop when you walked into a room.”
“Resignation. I knew nothing I did mattered a damn, so what was the point?”
“And now what you do does matter.”
“So to speak.”
Epps’s big eyes suddenly looked even wearier. “Gunning down that drug dealer was self-serving, bubba. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I can’t.”
“You didn’t want to tell your boy what happened to his girlfriend until you had squared things.”
“I figured that would avoid exactly what’s happening now.”
“Maybe you should’ve thought of that when you decided to still keep the truth back from him.”
“I just never got around to it.”
“Never known you to be scared of anything, bubba.”
“That what you think this is about?”
“I know it is. Fear that the boy’s growing up and slipping away. You tell him about his girl and what you done about it, you’re making him a man, and that’s what scares you.”
“I never felt so goddamn helpless in my entire life.”
“Really? I can remember meeting you in The Walls, the most feared outlaw in Texas beaten by a system that had fucked him good.”
“That was different.”
“Really, bubba? How’s that?”
“I could do something about it, exert a measure of control over the landscape. Can’t do that here.”
“And so there lies the problem.”
“Being a ghost doesn’t give you license to speak in riddles, champ.”
Epps swept his pale tongue about his parched lips. “Forgot to take one of my root beers down with me. Wouldn’t happen to have one handy, would you?”
“No. Sorry.”
“No matter. I’ll get me one soon as I get back where I be. Anyway, what I was getting at was this: all these changes in your life and you still can’t learn to trust nobody.”
“I trust Caitlin Strong.”
“That’s ’cause you know how good she is when it comes to guns and the situations that call for them. You don’t trust Dylan ’cause you don’t figure he can handle himself similarly.”
“With good reason, champ: he’s just a kid.”
“But whose kid, with whose blood pumping through his veins?”
“What’s your point?”
Leroy Epps lay back on the bed. He interlaced his fingers behind his head and stretched himself out, bagging his pant legs up so Cort Wesley could see the diabetes-spawned sores that had ultimately killed him with an infection.
“Well, bubba, you gotta trust this boy to do the right thing in even the worst situation. Not saying he’ll be able to get himself all the way out of it, no, but he’ll get himself square enough to buy you the time you need. I been looking in on the boy from time to time and, man, if I don’t blink twice I think I’m looking in on you, as far as the insides go anyway.”
“He’s not me, champ.”
“Close enough.”
Cort Wesley’s cell phone rang again and he jerked it to his ear, roused from the trance.
“I’m downstairs,” said Guillermo Paz.
41
MARBLE FALLS; THE PRESENT
Captain D. W. Tepper glared at Caitlin as soon as she walked into Ruby’s Diner where he had breakfast every morning before making the drive from Marble Falls to San Antonio. She moved straight to his booth, noticed the heaping plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and home fries before him. Untouched.
“Are you trying to make my life miserable, Ranger?”
“What I do now?”
“It’s not every day a man gets a wake-up call from the United States Army.”
Caitlin remained standing. “They apologize for trying to blow me up?”
“They were more interested in complaining about the holy hell you raised last night at the Intrepid Center, sticking your nose where it plainly don’t belong.”
“Oh, right, that was before they tried to blow me up.”
“Army folks told me that kid’s transfer was routine.”
“They say to where?”
“I didn’t ask, ’cause it’s none of my business. Yours neither.” Tepper looked down at his cooling plate of food and shook his head. “Last time I lost my appetite was on account of a bullet in my side your daddy had to pry out with that knife of his.”
Caitlin frowned. “You smell like smoke, D.W.”
Tepper dropped his hand down into his lap. “I gotta choose between ruining my lungs or my liver, so long as you’re raising hell in three different countries. Man oh man, it’s a good thing the USA’s got no neighbors to the east or west, or you’d be raising holy hell there too.” He ran a hand through the stiff gray hair he still smoothed with Brylcreem. “How you feeling?”
“Head hurts like hell and I can’
t kick the ringing in my ears, but I can still shoot.”
Tepper looked trapped between a breath and a belch. “I’ll keep that in mind. Tell me something, Ranger, you ever work with anybody you didn’t piss off?”
Caitlin grabbed a forkful of eggs off his plate. “Guess you know who I take after.”
“Difference is Jim Strong only pissed me off once.”
“Surprised it was that many times.”
“I never told you about it, did I?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Then it’s time you heard, Caitlin. This goes back to the Church of the Redeemer and that Killane lady he turned as an informant.…”
42
ODESSA, TEXAS; 1990
“Here’s the way I look at things,” Jim told her, really meaning what he was about to say. “You can get yourself another church, Beth Ann, but you can’t get yourself another boy.”
Jim Strong knew in that moment he had won Beth Ann Killane over, knew he’d secured the informant the Rangers desperately needed to put an end to whatever madness was going on inside the Church of the Redeemer. If only half the things they’d heard were true about girls little older than his daughter, Caitlin, sleeping with men and bearing their children, it was enough to turn any man’s stomach. And that didn’t take into account the very real possibility that the Reverend Max Arno was stockpiling weapons on the site for God knows what down the road.
Jim didn’t ask another thing of Beth Ann Killane until he had a pardon letter for her son, Danny, in hand. True to his word, he’d driven personally to Austin to collect it, not about to take no for an answer or accept any bureaucratic delays. The letter, as it turned out, was waiting for him, and he delivered it the next day to Beth Ann at the Pancake Alley diner in Odessa.